The reconstituted Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was the largest social movement of that decade, it fed off illiberal currents, admired fascist regimes, embraced paramilitarism and political violence, and enforced Prohibition as an attack on the lifeways of European immigrants and non-white-Christian populations.

The reflexive desire to interpret Trump through foreign historical analogies (Putin's playbook, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler) obscures the fact that deportations, expulsions, and politically potent illiberalism have deep, continuous precedent within American history itself, making this a domestic fight that America has cycled through repeatedly with losses and victories.

The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 was the first major immigration law establishing ethnic quotas designed to prevent migration from culturally 'unassimilable' regions and slow population growth from foreign groups, was celebrated by major newspapers (New York Times, LA Times) as preserving 'an America we feel comfortable with,' remained law until 1965, and harmed Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.

Illiberalism is defined as a way of thinking about the world characterized by: embrace of inherent inequalities and hierarchies of nation, race, and gender; desire for cultural and religious uniformity; particularist rather than universal rights (rights contingent on location/membership rather than inherent to persons); marking of internal and external enemies; use of exclusion or expulsion to deal with threats; association of power with political violence; and prioritization of community will over rule of law.

Operation Wetback under Eisenhower (now invoked by Trump) was a deportation campaign emerging from prior Bracero guest-worker program, and it expressed the deep contradiction in American economic development: dependency on immigrant labor paired with hostility toward immigrants, particularly toward Mexicans by the 1950s.

Mass incarceration is a continuation of the deportation and expulsion impulse: after 1960s urban unrest, decision-makers chose mass incarceration over military occupation, with bipartisan consensus on crime and racialized danger; incarcerated people are expelled from society and political power (no voting rights, limited legal recourse within prisons)—a more domesticated form of expulsion.

The Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 were a federal government campaign to repress politically objectionable people—including isolationists, socialists, communists, and anarchists—based on the view that the United States should be 'a republic of white Christians,' resulting in prosecutions (Eugene Debs ran for president from jail) and expulsions of foreign-born radicals.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, commonly read as a celebration of America's inevitable liberal-democratic ascent, actually contains extensive warnings about potential despotism, particularly centered on slavery, racism, the tyranny of the majority, and the possibility that Americans would quickly surrender rights to a strong man.

Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act and forced expulsion of Native peoples east of the Mississippi was not an isolated policy but a central aspect of American society and political culture in the 1830s, part of a longer process beginning in the 17th century and complemented by parallel expulsion campaigns targeting free African-Americans (via colonization schemes), Catholics, Mormons, and abolitionists through mob violence.

Jackson justified Indian removal by arguing that Native peoples didn't belong, were dying out anyway, and that removal to distant territory was actually in their interest—a rationalization of expulsion as benevolent, which modern readers recognize as horrifying only because of subsequent knowledge of Native American history and the reality of long-term dispossession.

Trump and his advisors (particularly Steve Bannon) explicitly model themselves on Jackson because they see in him: defiance of Supreme Court rulings (Jackson's response to the court on Native removal was 'let them enforce it'), the embodiment of executive power expansion, and the precedent for a strong leader willing to move in directions of his own choosing despite constitutional constraints.

The threads composing Italian and German fascism were earliest evident not in Europe but in America during the Progressive Era: social engineering, eugenics, disfranchisement, segregation, overseas warfare justified in racialized terms, and advocacy by figures like Herbert Croly for government by trained experts rather than Jeffersonian democracy, which the Nazis admired and emulated in their own eugenics programs.

Without saying America was moving toward Nazism, many Americans in the 1920s-early 1930s admired Mussolini as a strong, active figure pointing to Europe's future, because he seemed to recognize the limitations of liberal states that had fallen into question—this shared admiration between America and fascist regimes reflected common anxiety about liberal democracy's viability.

Disfranchisement and segregation (Jim Crow) were widely accepted by white Americans and political leaders as 'perfectly reasonable, perfectly modern' ways of managing diversity and inequality, reflecting that illiberal movements fulfilled a real social need for community-building and belonging—not merely angry venting but substantive social organization.

During the McCarthy era, universities, workplaces, and other institutions mostly bent the knee to pressure, quickly identifying and expensing people regarded as threats; people lost jobs, were blacklisted, excluded from unions at a critical moment in labor organizing (CIO rising power)—this bending-the-knee response in face of seeming power is a worrisome precedent for current institutional choices.

Japanese internment was possible because liberals, even those embracing admirable ideas, prioritize maintaining social order, accept cultural hierarchies, and were willing to identify internal enemies for repression—liberals played a key role in anticommunism and McCarthyism through figures like Arthur Schlesinger and Americans for Democratic Action, drawing boundaries around acceptable dissent.

Most political regimes throughout US history have been conservative; the United States has had a long history of both general violence and specifically political violence, where liberal democracy and political violence were interconnected from the beginning, usually benefiting wealth and power while excluding large sections of the public from decision-making.

Eisenhower, despite his post-hoc liberal reputation, appointed Earl Warren to the Supreme Court and then called it his 'worst mistake ever'; Warren authored Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and when Eisenhower had to enforce it, he was reluctant, requiring a second Brown decision for enforcement—showing illiberal action even by moderate Republican figures.

During Operation Wetback and other deportation campaigns, American citizens were deported in violation of rights they were assumed to have, establishing a precedent: rights have been systematically violated before, and citizenship itself has not guaranteed protection against expulsion despite the 14th Amendment—raising concern about current risks to established rights.

Obama's election was followed immediately by the birther movement, which harked back to Reconstruction-era rejection of Black empowerment; the birther narrative expressed the core illiberal belief that certain groups shouldn't legitimately hold power and that hierarchies are essential—Trump rode birtherism into political prominence.